Breaking the chains, winning the games, and saving Western Civilization.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

That would be why they don't hire women

After reading this, does this make you think that sexism in venture capital is a serious problem that needs to be addressed? Or does it make you think that it explains very well why venture capitalists are less than enthusiastic about hiring women in the first place?

A female intern at a venture capital firm who publicly spoke out about the overt sexism that she experienced, has revealed that she was reprimanded by her employer for doing so and 'treated like a perpetrator.'... She's since revealed that the firm 'wasn’t exactly ecstatic' about her decision to blog about gender bias, and scheduled several lengthy meetings during the final week of her internship in which her bosses wanted to know why she hadn't consulted them first and how they could spin positive publicity out of the incident.

Of the 46 employees pictured on General Catalyst's website, only four are female, with just one woman on the firm's investing side.

'The fact that all of the meetings they set up about my post that last week and beyond were with men, and that the majority of our conversations revolved around bringing this topic back to a positive perspective of what the firm and its peers are doing to solve the problem, made me feel as if the core of my post, my feelings and less-than-welcoming experience, were not valued,' Miss Swallow wrote in a first-person piece for the Wall Street Journal. 'They didn’t see that I felt left out; they saw that their firm was under attack,' she added.

Miss Swallow, who graduated with a Bachelor degree from NYU’s Stern School of Business in 2009, says that the final straw was during a 'highly constructive' conversation about diversity initiatives with her mentor at the firm, when another partner 'stormed in' and began reprimanding her.

'He said the post was misguided and anger-filled, and he was disturbed that he had received emails from LPs and portfolio founders asking how I could have done what I did. After multiple calm responses to his shouting, I couldn’t take it anymore. He had been standing and pointing furiously at me the entire time, while everyone else was seated. I stood up, tears falling from my eyes and my breath becoming uncontrollable, and said I wasn’t going to take this treatment. I hadn’t done anything wrong for speaking up about something I felt was an issue, but I was being treated like a perpetrator. I had broken their trust, they told me. And maybe I had, but I would not be silenced and belittled,' she wrote.

Notice how her priority at her INTERNSHIP was not learning how to do her job, but changing the firm to better meet with her approval. Any venture capital firm would have to be completely insane to hire a female control freak like this; the moment an INTERN mentioned the word "initiative" should have been enough to set off enough red flags, sirens and warning bells to justify her immediate termination. Holy water, a stake to the heart, and beheading might be wise as well, just in case.

The problem isn't actually with women per se, but with Social Justice Warriors, people who see themselves as activists imbued with the holy right to Fix What Is Wrong with every organization foolish enough to grant them entry. Every female SJW will make it an absolute priority to do "women's outreach", just as every black SJW considers "affirmative action" to be vital and gay SJWs inevitably believe that the most important issue concerns insufficient homosexuals in the organization.

Don't let these parasites into your church, association, or company. They are literally worse than useless. If a person proudly talks about championing this cause, leading that initiative, or launching any "effort" that involves buzzwords like diversity, outreach, inclusivity, or whatever, then you know their focus in the future will be attacking the organization, not doing their job.

40 comments:

Sounds like the end of my marriage, where the more I tried to talk calmly to her and find out what was bothering her, the more she accused me of things like "storming in" and "belittling" her. Hiring women appears to have all the drawbacks of marrying them without any of the benefits.

Putting this post together with the Zoe Quinn posts: it's amazing how people -- even the guy who got burned by it all -- can claim with a straight face that the computer industry needs SJWs, because otherwise it would be a bunch of white guys keeping everyone else out. Anyone who's ever been around typical computer geeks knows that they'd give their right arms to have girls spend time around them and show an interest in their geekery.

Once upon a time, I was hanging out playing C64 games with some friends. There was a girl there -- kinda plain and mousy, but not ugly -- who was interested in my friend Jack, and everyone knew it. Except this one really awkward geek who had a crush on her. At one point she said something about her shoulders being tired, trying to get Jack to rub her shoulders, but Jack was busy talking or playing a game or something, so geek boy piped up and offered. She couldn't really say no, so she sat there and let him rub her shoulders for what must have been an hour. He would have gone all night, because he was completely oblivious to her body language, but she finally asked him to stop. I think she was getting sore.

That's the "misogyny" of the computer geek culture: if a girl wants in, all she has to do is show up and show an interest, and she'll get stroked and pumped up by those so-called exclusionary white guys until she can't stand it anymore.

Erica Swallow (*snicker*) waited until the last week of her internship to start blogging about the gender issues she faced at a start up. She tried to pretend that this was a spur of the moment sort of thing, suggested by her professor.

It clearly wasn't.

This was Plan A from the start. I'm sure her only real regret is that she didn't run into any authentic sexism and had to make due with discomfort. This new generation is so weak, they need permanent disability and PTSD counseling if they stub their big toe.

Erica identifies herself as a Technology Journalist. That frankly says a lot about her. I can remember when Wired was a libertarian magazine.

Time for Game Stuff:

Key quote an industry that’s well-documented to be lacking people who look like me, Erica is about a six that cleans up to a seven. However, she hangs out with gamma tech-nerds, so she is used to being treated like an eight. She has plenty of low status orbiters.

MIT student and can do an unpaid internship, so her parents have plenty of money. Her picture in WSJ shows a professionaly unpleasnt and brittle young woman. Her picture from the Mail on the other hand indicates slut face.

Cataline's verdict: Feminist SJW whose personality has not yet been carved by time into her face. Doubtless a future Alpha Widow with two ex-husbands and way too many cats.

After multiple calm responses to his shouting, I couldn’t take it anymore. He had been standing and pointing furiously at me the entire time, while everyone else was seated. I stood up, tears falling from my eyes and my breath becoming uncontrollable,

I know when I make repeated calm responses, I'm usually in the midst of full-on tears.

However, she hangs out with gamma tech-nerds, so she is used to being treated like an eight. She has plenty of low status orbiters.

That may be the key. On her blog, she's cute in a geeky way, though she should get something done about her teeth. Points for long hair and smiling; in some she looks like the bookish girl next door trying to look sophisticated and not pulling it off. And for once I'm seeing a tech girl's blog that appears to be mostly about the tech (well, social media), rather than a thinly veiled excuse to talk about her cats or her feelings.

But in the first picture, she has her arms up in a "Look, boobs!" pose. For the kind of guys she's used to working with, she's the hottest girl who's talked to them lately who wasn't being paid to. She's used to being the queen of the A/V club. Then she gets an internship at a place where they just want her to shut up and do her job, stay out of the way and learn, and she feels unappreciated because they didn't find her ideas as fascinating as she did. Well, she would.

She's just plain being dishonest here, though: "You can imagine that the firm I was employed with wasn’t exactly ecstatic about my stance. In fact, I had shared my post with them immediately after I had published it, expecting my colleagues to be excited about a new perspective." Yeah, that's why she published it first and then told them. It's one thing to give constructive criticism, but telling them they should be excited about it is just putting the knee in. No one gets "excited" about criticism, especially when the target is the last to hear about it.

so she's a rich "tech journalist" who took an internship just so she could write about the horrible muhsahjuhnee but really all she did was make it harder for the next girl to get hired at that place. feminists: making the world worse for women.

An internship is easily not renewed, thank goodness. She can't affect change without being a full-time employee. Her goals are not aligned to the duties of her job. I found it strange that her employers would attempt to do damage control, when the easier damage control is releasing her early from her internship. She can't continue to publish damning testimony when she doesn't work there anymore.

She doesn't take responsibility for her actions. Yes, she is a perpetrator for damaging her company's reputation. If it is accurate, the best thing is resign. I quit jobs before because I couldn't stand the favoritism or the work conditions. Certainly, there could be racism or gender bias, but who cares? Making it solely about race or gender is laziness for lack of performance.

It must also be tough when you have the financial support to have been aiming at months of unpaid work at a winery with the goal of starting your own vineyard. Men have it so much better off since most have to work hard for they get.

Yeah, that's why she published it first and then told them. It's one thing to give constructive criticism, but telling them they should be excited about it is just putting the knee in. No one gets "excited" about criticism, especially when the target is the last to hear about it.

And no non-SJW gets excited about criticism when it's of the Marxist Frankfurt School variety. Mostly just eye-rolling combined with a worried quick look over your own shoulder.

@CatalineThis was Plan A from the start. I'm sure her only real regret is that she didn't run into any authentic sexism and had to make due with discomfort...

Erica identifies herself as a Technology Journalist.

This is almost certainly what this is all about. She wants to be a writer. Fine, go stand over there, with everyone else. No not there, those are the women who want to be marine biologists at Marineland. No, not that crowd either, those are the women who want to be fashion purchasers. Yes, there you are, wait with the hordes of other women who dream of a job where they can endlessly pronounce wisdom they have never gained.

The field is too crowded, and she needs to do something special to get in. If she were married to a great man she could divorce and write about how her choices are hurting her children. But she found a quicker way. Now she has controversy, enough to hopefully get her a job as a professional writer.

Another perfect example of how women use Male Space:http://therationalmale.com/2014/06/03/male-space/

Overseers in the Locker Room

The second purpose in the goal of female inclusion into male space is really a policing of the thought dynamics and attitudes of the men in that space. When women are allowed access to the locker room the dynamic of the locker room changes. The locker room can take many different shapes: the workplace environment, the sports team, the group of all-male coders, the primarily male scientific community, the ‘boys club’, the group of gamer nerds at the local game store, even strip clubs and the sanctuary you think your ‘man cave’ is – the context is one of women inserting themselves into male space in order to enforce the dictates of feminine social primacy.

When the influence of feminine-primacy is introduced into social settings made up mainly by men and male-interests, the dynamics and purpose of that group changes. The purpose becomes less about the endeavor itself and more about adherence to the feminine-inclusionary aspect of that endeavor. It starts to become less about being the best or most passionate at what they do, and more about being acceptable to the influence of the Feminine Imperative while attempting maintaining the former level of interest in the endeavor.

Men unaccustomed to having women in their midst generally react in two ways; According to their proper feminized conditioning, they embrace the opportunity to impress these ‘trailblazing’ women (hoping to be found worthy of intimacy) with their enthusiastic acceptance of, and identification with, their feminine overseer(s), or they become easy foils of an “out moded” way of thinking that the new ‘in-group’ happily labels them with.

Once the feminine-primary in-group dynamic is established a ‘feminine correct’ social frame follows. This feminine correction restructures the priorities of goals, and validates any accomplishments, in terms of how they reflect upon the feminine as a whole. Thus any in-group success is perceived as a feminine success in male space, while in-group failures or simple mediocrity is either dismissed entirely or blamed on out-group men’s failure to comply with, or the rejection of, the Feminine Imperative’s ‘correcting’ influence on the in-group.

Heh. In a meeting with our VP for HR, she mentioned that it has been brought to her attention many times that men make less than 20% of the workforce in our entire building.(Most of us are in Business analysis, IT, or facilities functions).She has been flat out instructed to "do something about it", but her answer is that there just aren't many men applying for HR positions, She also points out that this "balances out" the gender disparity in the rest of our corporation.

Whenever women colonize a previously male space or organization, the mission of the organization changes from whatever it was founded to be (e.g., protecting the homeland, making money for shareholders, producing fun video games at affordable prices, or whatever) to attending to women's immediate wants and needs, which then takes precedence over absolutely everything else, even the survival of the organization itself.

"The problem isn't actually with women per se, but with Social Justice Warriors..."

Huh? What woman even makes it through a simple undergrad degree who isn't, at least majority, turned into such a monster. Some make it out, those who go on to find a career and not a husband, or while they are doing that, are not among those who escape that trap. Women's education, beyond say... the eighth grade (assuming that can actually be improved to be what it used to be), needs to end. It needs to go the way of the lobotomy. Both work, in a very rough sort of way, but neither is productive, costing without gain, retarding rather than improving.

Just today, I was "verbally attacked" by a SJW as I was mentally trashing 5 or 6 female coworkers. I was laying some Red Pill knowledge on their asses in a very machojerk/asshole way: girls past 25 are done, it's stupid to buy an expensive wedding dress, ... I was basically doing what all women do to (nice) guys, which is to destroy their self-esteem by acting entitled and having no regard for their feelings. They were all half-smiling, half-laughing in turn as I was making fun of them one after they other. They were digging my jerkish ways.

Then out of nowhere some feminicunt lashes out at me. "You are ugly and stupid. Acting all cool. You are but a failed attempt at acting like James Bond." You get the idea. Yes, she did come up with the James Bond line. I have no idea how she came up to think about this. I checked her with "Tell me something I don't know.". Then just left to avoid further escalation on her part (workplace).

Well, turns out she had to defend women's honor because I dared to ask some of the older girls their age. And apparently it's not appropriate to do so.

On a side note, women are obsessed with beauty. They will talk about a guys looks for hours and days.

One of the problems with this made-for-tv movie, that Swallow is writing, is that it carries the same pitch-perfect, perfect storm of victimization that the woman who was offended, a couple of weeks ago, when her orbiter refused to orbit, described. I think she's watching herself play the role of the aghast and trampled business-virgin, while she writes it; she has Lena Dunham envy. (One of the problems with Lena Dunham is that her 'work' is so stupid, millions of young women must think that they too can 'be' Lena Dunham.)

They learn to do this on campus, incidentally. It's no longer cool for accusers, on campus, to be asked to document their accusations, provide witnesses, or receive questions. Questioning, as in the case of the Colorado philosophy prof, is "retaliation" if vaporous allegations are not acted upon.

The other problem with this morality play is that she's an intern, though she graduated over five years ago? Sounds to me like she was doing clerical work for free and decided to get even, perhaps out of status disequilibrium. Private equity/venture capital funds are intensely competitive places with highly structured staffing plans, and they don't casually pick up interns five years after they finished their degree. The normal career path is 2-3 years as an analyst immediately after graduation, then back for a finance MBA, then back into the fray. I've never met anyone in a firm of this sort who picked up an internship after five years of eat-praying-loving, or whatever it is that she has been doing.

@Rek: That's very bold to challenge the women like that. Next time, don't do it. Don't speak to women in the office. Don't encourage or flatter them. Don't criticize them. You're asking for trouble. Playing with fire will derail your career. If you don't care and just want to win the argument, then quit and get a new job. Maybe tell them off as you're leaving, but not before. You still need references.

@jimmy-jimbo: Good point. I am clearly considering getting a new job. 2,5 years @ an almost exclusively female populated workplace is running me down.

Just to be safer than sorry, I black knighted the sh!t out of the old hag. Went back into her office and told her I didn't understand what warranted her reaction. Then started the sob story about me being bullied all through highschool. Girls calling me ugly, having no friends. KO then and there. Good thing with women, they are quite dumb and we can be quite good manipulators.

Is this the same place her blog says is a "great opportunity" about a year and a half ago?

Yes, the same place that she still says is a good company and a great place to work, where she says everyone was nice to her and her mentor worked especially hard to help her succeed. She just had this one little complaint...

Seriously, I went and read her blog post that caused the controversy, because the WSJ article was so vague about what actually happened, and I still had to read between the lines because she can't really point to anything specific. The short version: she was brought on for an internship at this venture capital company. As part of the internship, she was asked to come up with a plan for discovering new venture capital opportunities -- a program that she could pursue while she was there.

She said, "Getting more women into VC deals." I assume that at this point, the VC guys had to work hard not to roll their eyes and say, "That's very nice, little girl," because that's like the least original idea she could possibly have. That's like hiring an expert to help you make your restaurant more profitable, and after a month he hands you a proposal that says, "Sell more food." Like everyone, including the government, isn't trying to get more women to start businesses, even if it means throwing grant money at unprofitable ventures. So (according to her) her mentor gently pointed out to her that her proposal was too general, that she needed something more specific that she could do in her short time with the firm. They pointed out that such a program would have to be headed up by a woman -- obviously women would scream if it weren't -- and they didn't have any extra women who could take it over when she left. They wanted her to come up with a project for her internship, not an unending project that would require them to hire more people permanently to support it. (If she was trying to create a permanent position for herself, it was an especially ham-handed way of doing it.)

So she was hurt that they didn't want to help get women into VC, which wasn't the point at all; they want to as much as everyone else does, but that wasn't a good internship project. The other thing was that she heard a guy telling a woman she didn't need to show up for the co-ed softball game that day if she didn't want to because they already had enough women. That's just how co-ed leagues work -- you have to have a certain number of women. Women also tend to be very busy, what with children to pick up at daycare and all, so if you have extras, it's quite likely that one will be glad to skip a game. The guy was just being nice and trying to head off the inevitable complaints that he'd get if they showed up to the game with more girls than required. But no, it's somehow an indication that they don't want women around except when they're forced to have them.

She has a chip on her shoulder and can't tell you why, hence the tears. I'd guess it comes mostly from college, being pumped full of feminism. It's a shame, because she'd make a cute wife/mom, and her smarts and ambition would do some good there, instead of being used to try to compete in male arenas.

OT: Vox, I found an older CH post where he describes the difference between a "beta" and a "herb". It looks like he has hit on a sociosexual hierarchy nuance, wherein "beta" corresponds to your Gamma, and "herb" more to your Delta. Unfortunately, he seems to have abandoned "herb" in the last couple of years.

Well, of course the people at the company wanted to control the situation and turn it into a positive for the company. That's what good company workers do. They value their jobs, and they want the company to succeed. Bad press might cost them business. What baffles me is how it is that this isn't what the college girl expected or wanted. She got in a room with them to talk about what might make the situation better for the company.

Oh...wait. She isn't interested in the good of the company. She's interested in her, and she feigns interest in all women. These loyalties are ahead of loyalty to the company for her. She's a woman first, dammit, and only an intern. She won't be here in six months, so it's no great loss to her to shit in the sandbox. The difference between this woman and a man working at the company is that the man views himself as a company employee first, whereas she views herself as a woman. Her loyalties are elsewhere.

This young woman has probably made herself toxic at a lot of companies, but who knows? She's a self-promoter. She knows how to use connections to get attention. What'd she do to get that article published in the first place? She knows the right strings to pull and knows some people in high places. She's bound to use those connections to land herself a plum spot somewhere, at which point she'll build a career in which she basically does nothing except network with people, play office politics, and jump ship to something better just before the last place goes down in flames.

She has a chip on her shoulder and can't tell you why, hence the tears. I'd guess it comes mostly from college, being pumped full of feminism. It's a shame, because she'd make a cute wife/mom, and her smarts and ambition would do some good there, instead of being used to try to compete in male arenas.

This. I could have easily been this girl if I had had a little more indoctrination at college (graduate school perhaps?) I'm so happy I stopped when I did and didn't waste so much money on college that it was a real issue to stay home and raise my kids.

That's the "misogyny" of the computer geek culture: if a girl wants in, all she has to do is show up and show an interest, and she'll get stroked and pumped up by those so-called exclusionary white guys until she can't stand it anymore.

A petfect anacdotal illustration of 1) how insufferably political the corporate workplace has become, to the detriment of both productivity and profit, and 2) how women too many women are aggravating this situation even further. A perfect "twofer."

John Molloy (of "Dress for Success" fame) wrote an excellent book, "Molloy on Success" (sadly long out of print), based on information taken from controlled experiments done by his company (the same scientific approach that made "Dress for Success" transcend every other book on the same topic) and secrets revealed to him by the many CEOs he knew.

Most of his executive interviewees initially claimed that their success followed from the same sort of bullshit this girl might say--"initiative", contributing valuable ideas, etc. Fortunately, Molloy was too shrewd and persistent to accept their first answer. Eventually, he managed to coax nearly every executive to admit that there had been a long period in his career when he quietly obeyed a superior who he resented or even hated. Most of the big-company executives rode to the top on the coattails of a superior they secretly disagreed with, but fully supported with their actions.

You can understand why most CEOs were reluctant to admit these truths. Unfortunately, most kids today are getting the exact opposite message about how success happens. It's amazing that modern corporations survive at all under the weight of all their employees' "valued feelings and experiences" and "highly constructive conversations."

Props to the partner who shouted at her for being the one person who tried to get some reality through her thick skull. It's a sign of the times that despite publicly betraying her new employer, she maintains she "hadn't done anything wrong."

It seems to come done to the problems of multiculti equalitarianism. That a young intern goes into an established organization and believes that whatever it is she has to add is as valuable (if not more valuable) than the collective wisdom of her superiors. Interns exist to learn first, contribute second. Since they are paid little or nothing, the firm is not expecting their contribution to be significant. Interns should be told that 1 they are not the smartest person in the room (even if 1 in a 1000 is) and that in order to learn, one must observe and listen. Contribute only when you have something that is fact based to say, as what an intern may consider wise-probably isn't.

I own a small tech company (currently employ eight people). I hate to say it, but I would never hire a young woman, and I would never hire a minority. Because either one, on a whim, could cost me tens of thousands of dollars or even put me out of business.